This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
On the first day’s shooting of Yves Montand’s debut Hollywood movie, Let’s Make Love, his leading lady turned up very late and told him “You’re going to see what it means to shoot with the worst actress in the world.” Well, ipsa dixit …
The she in question was Marilyn Monroe, and she spoke even truer than she knew. For whilst nobody wants to work with a star who is habitually — often enough performatively — late, how much worse to have to work with a star who doesn’t know her marks, who is incapable of giving the same line-reading twice, and who cares not a jot for the movie but only how she will come over in it.
(Simon & Schuster, £25)
Not that it was just laziness and egotism which ensured that Monroe was a hopeless actress. Her attitude problem was nothing next to her aptitude problem. There was, as Dame Edna once said to Jeffrey Archer, “no beginning to [her] talents”. In the only unimpeachably great movie she worked on, Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder had to shoot 50 takes of the moment in which Monroe is required to deliver the line “Where’s that bourbon?”
Even when she could be coaxed into remembering a couple of lines of dialogue, she could never say them with any dramatic conviction. Lacking all formal training as an actress, she didn’t know how to react, how to move, or even how to stand still whilst her co-stars went about their work.
Nor was she much of a singer. Her suitably fragile version of Gus Khan’s “I’m Through With Love” in Some Like It Hot aside, she never makes you feel that singer and number have melded. Where, say, Judy Garland lets you grasp what it is to live in misery even as her strident vocals triumph over it, Monroe simply asks you to feel sorry for her. To listen to her sing is to be reminded that sentimentality is a kind of pornography.
As in art, so in life. The lurid details of Monroe’s existence — the illegitimate birth, the doubts over who her real father was, her paranoid schizophrenic mom’s being shuttled from one booby-hatch to another, the fervidly religious foster parents, the serial claims that she was abused by sundry lodgers and landlords — all ensure that an air of sleaze shrouds even the most serious of books about her.
When, three-quarters of the way through I Wanna Be Loved by You, Andrew Wilson quotes a script supervisor telling him Monroe “was a whore at heart … in another age she would have been a prostitute”, I doubt that even her most worshipful fan could feign shock.
Published to mark the centenary of Monroe’s birth, and subtitled “A Life in 100 Takes”, Wilson’s book is plainly modelled on Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. But, I Wanna Be Loved by You has none of the manic virtuosity with which Brown reinvented the biographical form.
Where Brown offered up parody and pastiche, mock interviews and fantasy memoirs, Wilson gives us little more than a conventional, soup to nuts, chronological life. The book goes off-menu just once — when Wilson reprints verbatim a recipe for “Cheese Lasagne” that Monroe tore out of the New York Post.
To be fair, this snippet isn’t wholly pointless. Wilson wants it to demonstrate just how determined Monroe was to finally settle down to a regular wedded life with her third husband, Arthur Miller. After two sour marriages (the first a legalistic contrivance embarked on as she turned 16 and designed to prevent her from being sent back to the orphanage; the second — which lasted just nine months — to Joe DiMaggio, a baseball star who took violent umbrage to the filming of the scene in Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch in which Monroe stands atop a Manhattan street ventilator the better to air her “undies”), Monroe the West Coast trailer trash had high hopes of her affair with this East Coast keeper of the nation’s moral flame.
Alas, the third marriage didn’t take either. How could it? Wilson gives us as judicious a portrait of Monroe and Miller’s life together as I have read, but there’s no disguising the fact that, for both of them, the relationship was almost entirely transactional.
Whilst doubtless as flattered as any featherhead would be to catch the eye of one of the age’s greatest writers, Monroe patently hoped that marriage to Miller would reconfigure her Hollywood status as a third-string light comedienne. As for Miller, he was inarguably one of the 20th century’s most caustic ethical intelligences. Still, his description of Monroe as “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes” would read rather better had it not come from a man who’d just abandoned his wife and children for a birdbrain blonde with big bazoomers.
Then again, Monroe really did try her hand at verse. Indeed, Wilson, who a few years ago published a biography of Sylvia Plath, claims that the opening of one of Marilyn’s poems —
“Life —
I am both of your directions.”
— reminds him of Plath’s early work. Well, maybe. What there can be no doubt about is that Wilson, like so many writers on Monroe before him, is out to convince himself that his subject is rather more artistically significant than she was or could ever have been.
To be fair, Wilson doesn’t go as far as Norman Mailer, who in his absurd “novel biography” Marilyn first endorses Monroe’s fantasy of playing Grushenka in a stage version of The Brothers Karamazov and then raises it by suggesting she could also have played Cordelia in King Lear.
Though Wilson is level-headed enough not to fall for any of the flapdoodle conspiracy theories about Monroe’s early death (which might not have been suicide, but was certainly brought about by her own sedative-stuffed hand: during the last two months of her life, Wilson tells us, she was prescribed a combined total of 830 units of Valmid, Librium, Sombulex, Parnate, Percodan, Dex-edrine, Seconal, Tuinal, Darvon, Sulfathallidie, Lomotil, Phenergan, chloral hydrate and Nembutal), he is still far too starstruck to get a handle on his subject.
Hence his book ends with a crazed litany on how “Marilyn’s movies play on a constant loop … inside our heads”. Huh? Granted, All About Eve is still shown regularly on TV, but whoever watched that Bette Davis classic to glimpse its few longshots of a panicking young Monroe in full-on gulp mode? As for Love Happy, not even Marx Brothers completists talk it up. And there is unanimous agreement that Monroe’s two thrillers, Don’t Bother to Knock and Niagara, fail to thrill precisely because the leading lady is so miscast.
The only Monroe picture that endures is Some Like It Hot, though not because of anything she does in it. The dragged-up Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis (who ungallantly pointed out that he “had a better ass than Marilyn”) so thoroughly steal the show that all her scenes could have been left on the cutting-room floor and the movie would still be Wilder’s Meisterwerk.
Indeed, it was Wilder who best summed Monroe up. “Her biggest problem,” he counselled Arthur Miller in a letter Wilson doesn’t quote, “is that she doesn’t understand anyone else’s problems.” And since acting is nothing if not understanding people, it’s no wonder she was “the worst actress in the world”.
